Work Matters

Tag: IDEO

  • Why The New Yorker’s Claim That Brainstorming “Doesn’t Work” Is An Overstatement And Possibly Wrong

    The current version of The New Yorker has a wonderful article by Jonah Lehrer called "Groupthink" (you can see the abstract here).  It does a great job of showing how creativity is a social process, cites wonderful research by Brian Uzzi showing that when people have experience working together in the past they produce more successful Broadway musicals (up to a point, too many old friends is as bad as too few), and offers research showing that groups where members engage in constructive conflict are more creative — all themes I have talked about at various times on this blog. 

    I do however have a major quibble.  At one point, Lehrer states flatly that brainstorming doesn't work.  He later quotes creativity researcher Keith Sawyer as saying that people are more efficient at generating ideas when they work alone than in groups, something that is well-established.  But that is not the same as saying there is conclusive evidence they don't work.

    I once devoted way too much time to the question of whether this research shows that brainstorming is useless. In the name of full-disclosure, please note I am a Fellow at IDEO and also a co-founder of the Stanford d.school, which both use brainstorming a lot. But I am not at all a religious zealot about the method. I see it as just one sometimes useful method, and I have often said that the d.school in particular should spend less time teaching brainstorming and more time teaching people how to fight. (And if you want evidence that the d.school believes in more than just brainstorming, look at their Bootleg.)

    But please consider several facts about the brainstorming literature, at least as it stood about 7 or 8 years ago when I last reviewed it carefully and which is consistent with a more recent paper from The Academy of Management Review (Here is the abstract, which is quite short):

    1. Nearly all brainstorming research is done with people who have no training or experience in doing or leading brainstorming. In fact, there is at least two studies showing that, when facilitated properly, the so called productivity loss disappears. Check this 1996 study and this 2001 study.  To me, these two studies alone call into question the approach taken in most brainstorming studies, which don't use facilitation.   In other words, the conculsion that brainstorming doesn't work is based largely on studies that use unsupervised brainstorming virgins.

    2. As Keith Sawyer's comment implies, nearly all this research looks at only one measure of effectiveness, how quickly people can produce ideas.  Because people in groups have to take time to listen to each other, it slows the idea generation process. Most brainstorming studies compare the speed at which people generate ideas such as "what can you do with a brick" when sitting alone and talking into microphone versus doing so in face-to-face groups. In fact, if creativity is about both talking and listening, if you look at the data from these same studies, I once figured out that people are exposed to substantially more ideas per unit of time when you compare group to solo brainstorming — and I would argue that talking and listening are both key elements of the social process underlying creativity.

    3.A key part of face-to-face brainstorming is building on and combining the ideas of others.  This comparison is impossible in most brainstorming studies because an individual working alone is not exposed to the ideas of others.

    Indeed, one of the very first posts I did on this blog in 2006  dug on this issue.  As I wrote then, "To put it another way, if these were studies of sexual performance, it would be like drawing inferences about what happens with experienced couples on the basis of research done only with virgins during the first time they had sex." I also wrote about brainstorming here in BusinessWeek and they started with this setup.

    The upshot of my research and my reading of brainstorming experiments is that, if you are just looking at the speed at which an individual can spew out ideas, individual brainstorming is likely superior. But if you look at the range of positive effects has at a place like IDEO — spreading ideas around the company, teaching newcomers and reminding veterans of solutions and technologies and who knows what,  providing variety and intrinsically satisfying breaks for designers working on other projects, creating what I called a functional status contests where designers compete politely to show off their creativity (a key job skill), and impressing clients, brainstorming may have numerous other positive benefits in real organizations where creative work is done — none of which have not been examined in those simple experiments.  If so, those findings about pure efficiency may well be beside the point when it comes to evaluating brainstorming in organizations that use it routinely.

    In short, I believe that Lehrer's statement that brainstorming "doesn't work" is too sweeping because it has not been studied adequately in real organizations or with people who have real brainstorming skills. Again, I would describe this as a quibble; the article in The New Yorker is otherwise excellent.

    P.S. for the true nerds, here is the 1996 academic article on brainstorming that Andy Hargadon and I wrote:

    Download ASQ Storming

  • Stanford Magazine Story on the d.School: David Kelley as Founder, Jedi Master, and Cover Boy

     

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    The new Stanford Magazine just arrived and it has a fantastic story about the d.school called "Sparks Fly" and a nice sidebar on the efforts by Rich Crandall and others to teach design thinking in schools via their K-12 initiative. I am biased as I have been involved with IDEO (which David also founded) for over 15 years and with the d.school from the start.  As I wrote in a recent post about David's 60th birthday, he has had a huge effect on many people's lives and, I would argue, on bringing an engineering inspired (but appropriately flexible) perspective to problems as diverse as designing better radio shows, to improving company meetings, to launching new companies, to developing a cheap and portable alternative to incubators for premature babies in third world countries. 

    I especially liked how the magazine called David a "Jedi Master" as he has a rather magical and weird ability to mentor people, to give them strange and useful advice (like his reaction to my complaint that the d.school was out of control, when he advised that creativity was a messy process and would never be clean and pretty), to take time to give personal advice and help friends (David and his brother Tom Kelley played a big role in helping me make my decision last year to have surgery at the Cleveland Clinic rather than Stanford), to providing a perspective on leadership as striking a balance between love and money ( a perspective consistent with a lot of research, but stated oh so much better), to doing things that are just plain fun from giving me a singing fish to telling absurd and usually self-deprecating stories.  David is the rare leader who doesn't just talk about empathy, he has it in spades.

  • David Kelley on Love and Money: Dan Pink’s Kind of Guy

    This is a post I out up a few months back.  But as I am a guest on Dan Pink's new show "Office Hours" today at 2 Eastern, I thought I would bring to the top of my blog because David's perspective reminds me of Dan's philosophy and evidence in his bestseller "Drive."  Here goes:

    Yesterday, a couple hundred of us gathered at the Stanford d.school to celebrate David Kelley's 60th birthday.  The outpouring of love and affection was something — the guests included old friends he grew-up with, his family, Stanford colleagues (David is a professor and the main founder of the Stanford d.school), IDEO colleagues (David is co-founder of IDEO, was the first CEO, and the driving force behind the culture), dozens of former students, many of his friends from Silicon Valley businesses, and his friends from the car world (David loves old cars and has a pretty cool collection of old American cars and other cool things like a well-restored and "chopped" Mini and some classic Porsches).  The outpouring of affection was even stronger than it might have been because several years back David was diagnosed with cancer, and he seems to have beat it (his doctor was there, who David thanked for saving his life).

    David is one of the inspiring and wise people I've ever met (I once tried to write a book about him and IDEO called The Attitude of Wisdom… I have written about wisdom in subsequent books, but I still regret not finishing that book.)  One key to David's success is that, before he starts talking to the person in front of him, he actually listens carefully and takes in their body language before offering a comment or opinion — it is a rare talent, and one of many signs of his magnificent empathy. (Here is a recent Fast Company article that covers David and some of his latest accomplishments.)

    Document Kelley Lovemoney

    I could tell a a hundred stories about David, and as part of celebrating his 60th, perhaps I will write out a few more.  But one that has been top of mind lately is his "Love and Money" drawing (he did the one above for Good Boss, Bad Boss, but it remains unchanged over the years).  One of the first times I talked to David in depth, at some point in the early 1990s, as I was asking him about his management philosophy, he drew-out the graphic above and explained that, to run a business, you need to make money, but you also need to retain the talents and motivation of great people.  Yes, he said there are times when love and money go together, but there are always stretches of time when a boss needs to ask people to do things they don't want to do and don't love to make the necessary money required to keep the doors open.  But the smart boss realizes that he or she damn well build up some love points in advance to burn when some unpleasant money tasks are required.  

    This simple idea is strikingly similar to one of the main ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss — albeit one derived from research and theory on leaders rather than David's pencil.  As I argue in the book, the best bosses realize that one of the balancing acts that they walk is between pressing people to perform well for the collective good and treating them with respect, dignity, and injecting joy into their days at work.   This is why I came close to calling Good Boss, Bad Boss "Top Dog on a Tightrope" as the best bosses carry-off this daily balancing act in a masterful way. 

    This is developed on Good Boss, Bad Boss in some detail.  Here is an excerpt from Chapter 1 that focuses on my conversation with David about love and money (the same one where he drew the above picture; the original is in my Stanford office):

    David sees his job, or the job of any boss, as enabling people to experience dignity and joy as they travel through their work days (the love part, what I call humanity) AND to do work that keeps the lights on and provides them with fair pay, health care, and other necessities (the money part, what I call performance).  David says that, although sometimes you can accomplish both at once, there are always stretches when people must do things they don’t love to bring in money.  David explains that great bosses work to strike a balance between love and money over time, for example, by making sure that a designer who has worked on a dull, frustrating, and lucrative project gets to choose an inspiring if less profitable project the next time.

    Managers at IDEO don’t accomplish this balancing act just through bigger moves like project assignments.  They do it in little ways too: When designers have been working like dogs and are tired, grumpy, and starting to bicker, managers find little ways to slow things down, have some fun, and promote civility and mutual respect.  This might happen by making sure that a designer who has been grinding away designing a medical device can get a refreshing break by going to a brainstorming session, for example, on how to improve the airport security experience, get doctors to wash their hands, or design new playing pieces for the Monopoly board game. Managers at IDEO also provide breaks by shooting darts from Nerf guns or launching rubber darts called Finger Blasters at their people – which often degenerate into a full-scale 15 minute battles.  Such adolescent antics won’t work in every workplace.  But when the performance pressure starts heating-up and things are on the verge of turning ugly, skilled bosses everywhere find ways to give people a break, or tell a joke, or just make a warm gesture to place more weight on the “humanity” side of the scale.  As David put it, “foam darts aren’t for everybody, but there is always some form of play in every culture that allows people to let off steam.”

    Happy Birthday David.  As the  Neil Young song about his old car goes,  "Long May You Run."

  • Join Us and Whitney Mortimer for “IDEO in 4 Acts” this Wednesday at Stanford

    Mortimer_Whitney_bw1 This Wednesday, March 3rd, we are holding a special section of my class on Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based Approach.  Class will be held in an auditorium at Stanford, at Gates B01.  Our guest star for the day is IDEO Partner and head of marketing, Whitney Mortimer (pictured to the left). I have invited Whitney because our class is currently studying how to build and sustain a culture of innovation, and IDEO is the poster child for this feat.   \

    I've know Whitney more than 10 years and she has often been a guest in this class.  In general, she has refrained from being a public face who represents this great company, leaving that to others like the amazing Tim Brown and David Kelley.  But whenever I hear Whitney talk about IDEO, I always see them from a different and compelling vantage point, as her perspective on the links among IDEO's culture, strategy, brand, and history is unique, despite all that has been said and written about this great company and its leaders.

    This event is open to the public, but there are a few details and constraints.  First, pizza and soft drinks will be served right outside the classroom from about noon to 12:25.  Then Whitney's talk will commence from 12:30 to 1:30.  Because the room only holds about 200 people (and we will occupy perhaps 100 seats with our students and some other guests) we only have room for about 100 guests.  In addition, we need to know how much pizza to order. So, if you are going to join us, please send and rsvp to Carol XU, her email is jxcarol2001[at]gmail[dot]com.

    Also note that we are "closing" the invitation at 9AM on Weds. morning or when we are sold out, whatever comes first. We hope to see you there, it should be great fun, and it is a fun chance to learn about the history of one of the greatest and most civilized companies I know, and from a perspective that is a bit different than is usually told.

  • IDEO CEO Tim Brown: “I found it vaguely embarrassing and frustrating to be in an office.”

    I have argued in the past that there are a lot of evidence-based disadvantages to working in an open office, as there are many more interruptions, distractions, and other stressors — and of course less privacy.  And there are quite a few studies that show when people move from closed to open office designs, they don't like it all and their productivity sometimes drops.  I had an experience a few weeks back, however, that has me questioning the limits of this research — and believing that if an organization has the right norms, leadership, and especially collective trust  (and have the right people and right skills to truly do cooperative work), that open offices can be a splendid thing. 

    This all struck me a few weeks back when I went to visit  David Kelley at IDEO to chat about some ideas we were hatching for the Stanford d.school (which David, a Stanford professor, co-founded along with IDEO… David was the strongest driving force behind both ventures).  I had the usual delightful conversation with IDEO's receptionist (Joanie was working that afternoon) and went upstairs to what is best described as IDEO's "management floor," where IDEO's CFO, head of marketing, Chairman (David Kelley), General Manager (Tom Kelley), and CEO (Tim Brown) all work.  As I turned the corner to the main floor, sitting right where the receptionist on the floor would sit (if they had one, they don't) was none other than CEO Tim Brown.  I frankly took a double-take, as (in many organizations) he was sitting in just the place that would be reserved for an assistant, and frankly, would be seen as one of the lowest status places to sit because of the constant interruptions and because there was no gatekeeper to keep colleagues and random visitors like me from walking-up and talking to him.  I assumed this was a mistake or something, but became more puzzled when I realized that there was some stray group (including Chris Flink, head of  IDEO's New York office) in what I thought was Tim's office.  After I met with David (who was charming and fun as always), I saw that Tim was still there, and I asked him why he wasn't in his office. He said it wasn't his office any longer and that he had moved to what I would call the "receptionist's position," which made him — as he later explained it — "the most public person on the floor."

    I called him a week or so later to ask more about this approach. He told me that most of IDEO's senior people had moved out of their offices and now when there was a need for more private conversations, there were a lot of small conference available (i.e., their old offices) that everyone could use.  He then explained that after working for IDEO for many years — including as head of their London and San Francisco offices — after he became CEO five or six years ago and was given his own office (albeit a pretty small one with glass that limited his privacy) he found it "vaguely embarrassing and frustrating to be in an office." After awhile, he and others moved to a different approach, where they were out in the open and there was more casual and exchange and fewer barriers.  I also asked Tim what happens when visits IDEO's other offices — at places like London, Chicago, New York, Shanghai, and San Francisco. He said that — although he spends time in conference rooms in meetings with IDEO people and clients (especially when confidential matters are discussed), he takes a desk in the middle of the action because "When I am there to visit and get to know the people and how they work, I can't learn much sitting in a private office."  

    We also had a conversation about what he does when he needs a quite place to work, after all, he did write a great book last year called Change By Design.  He said that he has plenty of quiet time to think, especially when he travels, and that to write a book, well that was something that he did at home on nights and weekends!

    To me, the upshot of all this is NOT everyone should move to an open office and every CEO should be in the middle of the social swarm like Tim.   Rather, the lesson is that what Tim and other senior people at IDEO do works when you have the right kind of culture and leadership, when the work requires interdependence and knowledge sharing, and people have developed the right skills and routines to work effectively when they are out in the open and on display to everyone else.  I think it is especially important to develop strong norms around courtesy, about how loud to talk, when to avoid interrupting others, and so on, and to make it safe for anyone in the setting to gently remind others when they are violating such norms.  I have noticed, for example, that it took some years to develop these kinds of norms at the Stanford d.school (the one "open place" that I work at a fair amount), and we are now — on the whole — quite considerate and respectful. The great thing about IDEO, of course, is that they have the kind of culture and skilled people who can make openness work.

    P.S. In fact, if you are interested in Tim's perspective on the kind of people they strive to hire and develop, check out this recent interview that Morten Hansen (of Collaboration fame) did with Tim Brown on "T-Shaped People."